


Last Child of Mars

by eigengrau



Category: Mad Men
Genre: F/M, Homophobic Language, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Self-Harm, Slow Build, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 20:00:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eigengrau/pseuds/eigengrau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy picks him up from the hospital, which is weird, because Peggy never came to visit him in the hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Child of Mars

Peggy picks him up from the hospital, which is weird, because Peggy never came to _visit_ him in the hospital. When he sees her it’s with this awful fucking sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He isn’t sure if that’s from general embarrassment, or from fear—if she’s actually here, then, well, he’s mortified. But if she’s not, that’s substantially worse.

 

_they’ll never let you leave they’re holding you here forever forever forever_

 

He blinks the thoughts away. 

 

She stands at the end of the hallway and as he gets closer he can see that her eyes are shiny, her knuckles white where she grips the strap of her shoulder bag. The orderly escorting him elbows him in the side to try to get him to speed up, but it feels like his feet are two solid blocks of concrete, like he’s snitched on the mob and now they’re taking care of him once and for all. Every time he moves now it’s like walking through water.

 

He carries his things in a bag, cradled in his arms, and for a second he’s in the orphanage again, and Morris is waiting, smiling, and he’s so afraid but everyone keeps talking to him, _Solch ein Glücklicher Sohn, sollten Sie dankbar sein, ein glücklicher Junge..._

_lucky boy lucky boy lucky boy_

He can’t look her in the eyes and she reaches out slowly, like she’s scared he’ll bite, as if could ever hurt her. Physically.

 

The air between them is charged like repulsed magnets, an invisible force field pushing them apart. But then her palms are on his shoulders, solidly, holding him at arms length.

 

“Let me take a look at you.”

 

He lifts his head and it weighs a thousand pounds. She’s so beautiful, and he’s a disaster, he knows, and he wants to be swallowed up by the ground and die choking on dirt so he never has to see her disappointed again.

 

Her eyes are focused on his mouth. “You shaved?”

 

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice cracks, because of course it does. Her eyes snap to his and she bites her lip, her grip on his shoulders tightening for a second before she lets go and takes a step back.

 

“The car’s out front. Let’s go.”

 

* * *

 

 

Stan is sitting in the driver’s seat. As if Peggy wasn’t bad enough. He watches through the window of the car as they approach, eyebrows down, looking concerned.

 

Ginsberg could probably make a run for it. The parking lot is big, and there are trees just beyond the asphalt. He could head for the woods, tie his shoelaces to a tree, make a noose. Peggy wouldn’t be able to catch him in her high heels. Though Stan might summon his inner football player and tackle him before he got there.

 

_don’t think about that don’t think about bodies touching don’t_

He winces as Peggy opens the back door. She cocks her head. “Come on, get in.”

 

Peggy closes the door behind him and gets into the passenger’s seat. She and Stan both twist to look at him, squished in with his duffel bag, their eyes like two sets of lasers focused on his face.

 

“Hey, Ginzo,” Stan rumbles, lifting a hand and then dropping it. He squints. “You shaved.”

 

He nods.

 

“Cool.” Stan turns back around, like he’s looked at him as much as he can stand, and starts the car.

 

They get on the highway in silence. Trees and guardrails whizz by at fifty-five miles per hour. It’s winter and there’s snow piled up in dirty banks by the side of the road, the trees leafless and brown. There aren’t many cars out on the road. The slate gray morning sky burns a bright white out the window. It hurts his eyes, along with his head, and his stomach flips suddenly.

 

“Pull over!” He gulps, and he’s out of the car before Stan has even brought it to a full stop on the shoulder of the road. Wetness leaks through the knees of his corduroys as he drops to all fours, bile stinging his throat, his breakfast of toast and flavorless scrambled eggs recalled with a horrible wet splash onto the filthy snow. He’s shaking, and it might be because of the cold freeze seeping into his bones, but it’s probably not.

 

There’s a hand rubbing circles on his back, and another pushing his hair out of his eyes. Peggy and Stan hover over him, murmuring platitudes, touching him, and it’s all he can do not to scream as they help him to his feet and back into the car.

 

He lies down, stretching himself over the backseat and pillowing his head on his bag. They stare at him from the front, looking down, worrying. Peggy is saying something.

 

He closes his eyes and falls asleep almost immediately.

* * *

 

 

“Michael. We’re here.”

 

He blinks. There’s a hand on his shoulder, again. Is there something wrong with his shoulders? Why do they keep touching him there?

 

Sitting up, he looks around blearily. He used to wake up crisply, brain already moving at a thousand miles per hour, but nowadays it feels like his head is filled with pea soup half of the time. He isn’t used to being so slow.

 

“Where’s ‘here’?” He asks. Stan is leaning over him, taking his bag, and Peggy helps him out of the car.

 

“The apartment.”

 

He looks up at the building as he’s guided up the steps. “This is _your_ apartment.” Panic bursts bright and sudden in his chest. “Why aren’t we going to my apartment? Is Morris okay?” He’d come to see him in the hospital—when? Was it last week? It felt like last week, but maybe it was last month. When did he see him?

 

“Hey, calm down,” Peggy pets his arm gingerly. Every time she touches him, it’s tentative. “Your dad’s fine, but you’re going to stay with us for a little while. Just until you adjust.”

 

“He’s old. He can’t take care of me. I’m supposed to take care of _him_.”

 

 “Right. So, until you’re feeling…” she trails off. “You’ll stay here.”

 

His thoughts move three steps behind. He shakes his head fast, back and forth. “Nah, I can’t—no, I’ll go, don’t—just let me—”

 

“Stop that. No arguments.” Stan unlocks the front door. “We already made a bed up for you.”

 

The bed, it turns out, is a pullout sofa, piled high with pillow and blankets. It’s not cold in the apartment, the heater humming away at full strength in the corner, but he wants to bury himself in there, under a million layers of quilt, until everything goes away. He sits down, the springs squeaking under him. He’s so, so tired, and his head is spinning.

 

Peggy takes his bag from Stan and puts it behind the couch, then bustles into the kitchen quickly, chatting about something and then petering out into silence. Stan sits down next to him.

 

“Hey,” he says, and Ginsberg can’t, he physically can’t look up to meet him. “It’s not weird. You don’t have to feel bad about it.”

 

“Are you kidding? Of course it’s weird. Of course I feel bad.” For being a freak, a pervert, for looking at them the wrong way, the right way, for thinking bad thoughts, of _course_ he feels bad.

 

“They gave you pills?”

 

“They’re in my bag.”

 

Stan is easier to talk to than Peggy, if only by virtue of the fact that he’s actually interacted with him in the six months since he went away. They’ve talked, not about the important things, not about the whole wrongness of why Ginsberg was wearing white pajamas while Stan looked at him pityingly. Stan told him about work. Stan told him about baseball, not like Ginsberg actually cared about sports. Ginsberg told _him_ about the Jell-O they were forcing him to eat, about everyone who was out to get him, about the pills they were trying to make him take. _They’re poisoned, I know it, they’re trying to get rid of me_ , he hissed, and Stan shook his head and said, _I’ll talk to them about it, I’ll make sure they’re good, but please take the pills, Ginzo._

 

Ginsberg knows he never actually talked to the doctors, but he’d taken the pills because Stan had said so, and that, of course, made him realize that they weren’t poison. It was a Catch-22, he was aware of that. But Stan had said please.

 

“When do you need to take your next dose?”

 

“Tonight. Not until later.” His hand is shaking, and he feels like he’s about to fall over, so he lies down. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

 

Stan frowns. “You slept for an hour and a half in the car.”

 

He throws an arm over his face, hoping Stan won’t notice the trembling. “I’m real tired.”

 

After a minute Stan gets up and leaves, going to talk to Peggy in the kitchen. When they come out, Ginsberg closes his eyes and tries to even out his breath, pretending like he’s asleep. They go into the bedroom, but leave the door open, their soft voices drifting out in a conversation that Ginsberg can only half-hear.

 

He drifts off eventually, on top of the blankets, and dreams of nothing and no one.

 

* * *

 

 

Stan wakes him at eight o’clock with a glass of water and a pill on his outstretched palm. “I went into your bag,” he says, apologetically. Ginsberg takes both and closes his eyes as the pill goes down, heavy and ugly in his throat. It leaves a feeling like there’s a lump, like it’s caught in his esophagus somehow, though he knows it isn’t.

 

It’s dark out, and Ginsberg can hear the honking of horns and sounds of traffic through the window. He’s missed that, sounds of life-as-usual instead of antiseptic silence, or screaming.

 

Peggy comes in through the front door with brown bags full of takeout, and the smell of Chinese food makes Ginsberg’s stomach rumble loudly. She smiles at him.

 

“Hungry?” she says, shedding her coat. “I got pork dumplings, your favorite.”

 

“Ha ha,” he pushes himself out of the blankets that somehow got cocooned around him while he was asleep. She hands him a steaming carton and a pair of chopsticks, and he opens it to find chicken lo mein. His mouth waters.

 

Stan and Peggy settle around him on the living room’s threadbare armchairs, digging into their food. It’s almost like the nights they would spend working late on new campaigns, stuffing their faces with takeout and coffee and tossing around ideas. Almost, but not enough. Ginsberg’s hands are clumsy, still shaking, and he can barely hold his chopsticks, let alone use them. After stabbing at the noodles for a few minutes, he gives up, face flushed red.

 

“Can I have a fork?” he asks.

 

Peggy stares. Stan does too, but only for a second before he jumps up and heads to the kitchen.

 

“Your hands—” she starts, then stops herself.

 

“The pills do weird things to my muscles,” he says, trying to sound nonchalant about it, and not like he wants to die of embarrassment right here and right now. “Makes ‘em too relaxed, not relaxed enough.”

 

“Jesus,” she mutters as Stan comes back, handing a fork to Ginsberg. He scoops up the lo mein quickly, hoping that Peggy won’t ask him any more if his mouth is full.

 

He used to be the best of the three of them when it came to using chopsticks. He had the steadiest hands.

 

He swallows the noodles and stares straight ahead of him.

 

They congregate around the white noise of the TV, all focused on the program, none of them paying attention to it. Ginsberg eyes Stan’s hand on Peggy’s knee, looks over at the bedroom, and puts two and two together.

 

“So how long?” he asks, breaking the silence. They look at him like he’s just fired a gun into the air.

 

“How long what?”

 

He rolls his eyes. “How long has Stan been living here?”

 

“I’m just… we thought we should both—” Stan fumbles with the words worse than Ginsberg had fumbled with the chopsticks.

 

“It’s pretty obvious, you don’t have to pretend like you’re not—” he waves a hand in a vague motion. “I’m happy for you both,” he forces out from behind his teeth.

 

Because he is. He really is. His two favorite people in the universe are living together, clearly romantically, and I mean, it’s not like he didn’t see that coming. But he feels like a problem child who’s been sent to live with his aunt and uncle, intruding on them, invading. And he feels—

 

_don’t say it. don’t_

—he wishes he was a part of that. God, it’s not like it’s a secret. Even though he trusts that Peggy wouldn’t have told Stan what he’d said about his shoulders (and dear God, let him die now just remembering it, the shame is hot in his throat), he’s fairly certain that he’d repeated similar things, straight to his face, when he first started visiting him. He hadn’t exactly been lucid. Why would these perfectly nice people let a half-faggot pervert like him into their home?

 

“Thanks,” Peggy says carefully. “And it's been a few months. Do you want soy sauce?”

 

“Yes.” He takes the packet from her and rips it open shakily, spilling sauce all over his noodles. It’s delicious—he’s missed real food. He’s missed everything.

 

“Anything important happen while I was away?” he asks. “Aside from the Mets winning the World Series, Stan told me about that already.”

 

“Um.” Peggy thinks about it for a minute. “Well, Brian Jones died. Crazy hippies killed Sharon Tate, and, uh… oh, Ho Chi Minh died…”

 

“Why does the only stuff you remember involve people dying?” Stan asks, rolling his eyes. He points a chopstick at Ginsberg. “You’re gonna love this one, man. Guess what happened in July?”

 

“Stan.” Peggy says warningly.

 

Ginsberg doesn’t look at her. “I don’t know, what happened in July.”

 

A grin spreads over Stan’s face, teeth white and straight under his beard. “We landed on the moon. We sent guys to the moon.”

 

It feels like his heart has stopped for a moment. Finally, he forces himself to ask: “When in July?”

 

“The twentieth.”

 

Less than a month after he’d gone. That would have been right around when he was doped up to his eyeballs, before the electroshock but after he’d tried to escape. He’d been drooling on a cot with leather straps around his arms and his head while men had been walking on the moon.

 

“Did they come back?”

 

“Oh God, yes.” Peggy frowns. “Months ago. No, they’re fine.”

 

“It was like something out of science fiction,” Stan is still smiling.

 

He missed it. They went up there and he missed it. The pills remind him of everything the doctors said— _paranoid delusions, not a Martian, human, human, only human, Michael_ —but it stings, like a needle to the heart of him. That people went to space. That it wasn’t _him_. That he didn’t even know about it until five months later.

 

Stan nudges him with his foot. “You okay? You look pale.”

 

“Mm hmm.” He swallows. An ad for Heinz comes on the TV, the jauntiness of it making their lack of conversation even more awkward.

 

Peggy stands, taking all of their cartons like the mother hen that she is. “It’s late. I’m gonna rinse these out and put them in the trash.”

 

“Okay,” they say in tandem. Her boys. No, not her boys, Ginsberg reminds himself. Her boyfriend, beau, squeeze, roommate of sin, whatever, and… him. Whatever he is. The world’s most awkward house guest/charity case.

 

That’s the only possible reason for him to be here: charity. Bless Peggy’s good Catholic heart. But also, fuck Peggy, because the last thing in the entire fucking universe that he wants is her pity. It makes him sick again, but he’s determined to keep the Chinese food down, and he swallows back the bile.

 

Stan gathers the chopsticks and holds a hand out for Ginsberg’s fork. “I’ll wash that.”

 

“I can do it,” Ginsberg says, suddenly testy. “I mean, I’m already imposing on your hospitality, I might as well wash my own fucking dishes.”

 

“Okay.” Stan takes a step back, palms up in surrender. “Whatever you want, man.”

 

Peggy is taking the containers apart when he walks into the kitchen, breaking down the white boxes so that they flatten easily into the trashcan under the counter. She looks surprised to see him, holding his lone fork. “I’ll wash that,” she says, and he shakes his head.

 

“I’ve got it.” He crosses to the sink and turns on the tap, determined to do at least one productive goddamn thing today, one thing that makes him feel like he’s even vaguely a normal human being. He covers the fork with soapsuds and scrubs it like it’s done him a personal injury.

 

Her fingertips touch his back through his shirt and he jumps, water slopping over the lip of the basin and down his front. “Sorry.” She doesn’t move away though, flattening her hand on his spine, holding it there like he’s a hot stove that she’s been dared to touch. He wants to lean into it, to let himself fall back onto her, to have more of her touching him. But he also wants to jump out the window, so, there’s that.

 

“It’s good to have you back,” she murmurs. He nods, heart in his throat.

 

“Good to be back,” he says, though he isn’t sure if it _is_ good, or if he’s even back at all, really.

 

“Seriously,” she says, and then her hand is on his cheek, turning him to face her, to look away from the water and into her eyes. Oh _God_. “I missed you.” She shoots a glance into the other room. “We missed you.”

 

Ginsberg nods again. Even if he had words, they wouldn’t be coming out. Six months ago he’d probably say something sarcastic. Now his brain doesn’t move fast enough for him to even find an “Um.”

 

“Okay,” Peggy says, more to herself than to him, and takes her hand away. “I’ll leave you to your fork, then.”

 

She does leave, heading back to the living room. Ginsberg lets out a breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding. Under the hot water, his hands are trembling. He yanks them out of the sink and dries them and the fork, dropping it back into the drawer with the spoons and knives. His bones ache, full-body tired again despite the food and the two naps earlier. He leans against the counter, willing the shakes to go away before he follows Peggy.

 

She’s standing in the doorway of the bedroom, watching him. Stan pokes his head out from behind her. Ginsberg smiles weakly.

 

“I’m gonna pass out again. Sorry I’m sleeping so much.”

 

“It’s fine,” Peggy flaps her hand at him. “It’s totally normal, I mean it’s,” she glances at the clock, “nearly nine thirty. We should all be getting to bed.”

 

Ginsberg knows for a fact that Peggy hasn’t gone to bed before midnight since she had the flu two years ago and he brought her matzoh ball soup, which she nearly fell asleep in. The lie grates on principal, but it’s sweet of her to try to make him feel like less of a freak.

 

He turns the coffee table lamp off and crawls under the covers on the sofa bed and watches from the corner of his eye as Peggy and Stan retreat to the bedroom, closing their door halfway. He can hear them rustling around, and he listens long after the sliver of light from their bedside lamp goes dark.

 

He lies there, thinking about moon men and space and Peggy and Stan until the dark curls into his head, and he sleeps.


End file.
